Right? As you can see in the chart…
In other words, if you’re constantly testing stuff, it really doesn’t matter if one out of 10, or even one out of three fail, if you are overall producing good results and things are getting better and better. You could say, if I asked you for a favor now and let’s say you were going to do it, I say, “Hey, would you help me, I don’t know, write an essay?” You would say, “Sure, I’ll read it over and give you some feedback.” If I said, “Hey, would you read over this essay and give me feedback, I’ll give you $3,” you don’t get the motivation of the social good and the motivation of the $3.
Although, I suppose that you could get a bad actor who really doesn’t care. I think they’ve adopted many of these principals much more aggressively than those businesses that really have more difficulty measuring the results of their marketing. If you follow kind of principal, you would not be that influenced by one-offs, you shouldn’t. You do an experiment, it doesn’t work, you do it again, you do it again, you do it again. Even some very well-known work, like Amy Cuddy’s Power Posing, or John Bargh’s Priming work, that maybe that work isn’t really statistically sound, and that other labs have had difficulty reproducing it.On the other hand, I’ve seen very persuasive arguments that it isn’t always to just say, “Oh, I’m going to reproduce this,” and do it if you really don’t follow the exact same protocols, and so on.
Isn’t there some danger that if you operationalize this concept it’s going to work with most of the folks but there will be people … Sort of like if a bank didn’t lock up their money, most people would probably be fine just sort of transacting on an honor basis but there would be a few folks who would not want to do that.Dan Ariely: You know, generally in society, we work very hard to minimize the few bad apples, but we don’t think about the cost it creates for society as a whole. It is so important because if you’re in a confrontational insurance situation, which is the current situation, you start the exchange with lack of trust. You add an incentive, and rather than add to the motivation you detract from the overall motivation. This is really a waste of my time.” That’s kind of an extreme example, but I think that can happen in many kinds of situation.Dan Ariely: Yeah, and this is what is called crowding out. People join around the charity, charity of their choice, something that they really love.
This is kind of the old idea of insurance, it was still a mutual, where you basically said, “It’s mutual collateral.” We’re kind of going back to that situation.Why is it so important? We’re building lots of things into the product that will basically remind people about their own moral fiber. We see lots of interest in this from the policy perspective. They do have security procedures but they’re more in the background.
We asked the question of, “When will they stop?”In the first condition, that we called the “meaningful condition,” it was not really meaningful but what happened was people build a Bionicle, they finished, we said, “Hey, would you like to build the next one for 30 cents less?” If they say yes, we gave them the next one and they kept on doing it until they said, “No more.”In the second condition, we call this the “Sisyphic condition.” It started the same way, they build the first one, they finish, we said, “Hey, would you like to build a second one for 30 cents less?” If they said yes, we handed them the second one but when we took the first one from them, we started breaking it apart in front of their eyes as they were building the second one. The people who are trying to replicate don’t have a class with 500 students. They come back to me and say, “Hey, is it this translation or this translation?” I don’t always know. The second thing was, when we describe this experiment to people and we say, “How much do you think people would work less in the meaningless condition, the Sisyphic condition, than the control condition?” People thought that the effect would be about a difference of one Bionicle, when in fact it was three. Right? I think that, too, the performance marketers have kind of that same attitude. If you want to briefly explain that one, it would be great.Dan Ariely: This was an experiment in which people build Bionicles, and they build Bionicle in what we call in the “diminished pay wage.” They got, let’s say $3 for the first, then $2.70 for the next, and $2.40 for the next. No matter what the experiment is, don’t be convinced 100%.
We just posted something that we processed a claim in less than three seconds. It includes some really amusing illustrations, by Matt Trower. He visited us way back in episode 60, and that episode proved to be one of our most popular. I think that, as business people, they’re very open to trying new ideas that might give them an edge over their competition, or perhaps improve their conversion rate from 6% to 8% even, which would be a huge change in revenue and profits. You also see more and more arguments from social science in the legal profession, and of course, companies are starting to adopt things in a very, very different way.I think, overall, the place we’ve had the biggest impact I think is just with people who read, the next impact has been with business, and then governments are slowest but they’re getting there.Roger Dooley: Yeah, I’ve seen quite a bit of change, I think in particularly the digital space, where you’ve got digital marketers that are very performance-oriented, and they have the ability to measure different effects. People have to feel that their work has some kind of meaning.